Fixing Psychology

Saturday, December 16, 2017

This is the third in a series of posts examining the Special Issues of
the journal “Ecological Psychology” commemorating the 50th
anniversary of “The Senses Considered As Perceptual Systems.”

Harry Heft brings his unique insights regarding the history of
psychology to bear, with a focus on the relatively-understudied implications of
Gibson’s work for understanding culture. Recall that part of Gibson’s challenge
to the field (see Shaw 2002) was to see how much could be covered by perceptual
processes, and avoid the temptation to start hand waving at higher-level
processes whenever the going got tough. One aspect of Gibson’s work,
comparatively neglected by both his proponents and his critics, is his attempt
to see how far he could push perceptual theory towards explaining the
interaction of people in situations where cultural practice plays a strong role
in determining what the world affords. As usual, Heft’s writing is clear and
keen. If you haven’t read any of his work before, I suspect you will find this
article deeply insightful, and that it will lead you to seek out more of his
work.

Haptic perception is extremely neglected relative to visual and auditory perception. The term could refer simply to feeling things by touch, but in the context of EcoPsych is more likely to refer to perception as the result of manipulating objects, i.e., picking things up and moving them around. The Senses Considered included chapters about the haptic system, but
offered only a cursorily outline of what an improved study of the haptic
system would look like. Some the first wave of Gibson-inspired researchers latched onto those chapters, and created some of the more notable research triumphs of the field. Carello and Turvey performed, or supervised people who were performing, much of that work. Given that several good summaries of the research exist, they choose to focus instead on showing how the haptic research has been a uniquely suited context for exploring the novel implications of an ecological approach to perception.

Vision research was impacted tremendously by the short career of David Marr. Marr was tremendously impacted by James J. Gibson, though mostly by Gibson's earlier work on optic flow, and not by his later works that birthed Ecological Psychology. Marr was incredibly influential in the move towards thinking of vision (and neuroscience in general) as "modular", while most of Gibson's work would lead one away from modular thinking. It is this tension that motivates Sedgwick and Gillam's article "A Non-Modular Approach to Visual Space Perception."

These special issues were organized by Covarrubias, Jiménez,
and Cabrera, from the University of Guadalajara, and Costall from the
University of Porsmouth, and they provided an introduction to both issues. Putting together these issues is a tremendous service to the
field, and I hope that the articles contained therein will help shape the
field’s future. It is worth starting with some highlights from the intros
themselves, and the next post will start with the looking at the contributed
articles.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

I recently completed what will be my last review for PsycCritiques, the online journal that succeeded the print Contemporary Psychology, which itself ran from 1956-2004 (founded by Edwin Boring). The book was a good one:

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

There has been another prolonged absence on this blog, about 5 months this time. While a shame, at least that time has been productive. I completed a few projects and began a few more. It is time to restart things here.... again.

Later this week, I will start with a review of the recently published biography of E.C. Tolman.

After that, I will start reviewing articles from this year's Special Issues of the journal Ecological Psychology, which were dedicated to the 50th anniversary of Gibson's "The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems." (They can be found here, and here.) That book was crucial because it was the first big statement about Gibosn's system, following only a small number of articles hinting about the direction his thinking was moving in. It is less read than his 1979 books, which is a shame, because in many ways it lays the system out better, including more in depth discussions about the physiology and evolution of sensory systems. I've skimmed some of the articles in the Special Issues, and there is some really impressive scholarship there; things that I hope will influence the field for many years to come, and which deserve to have influence beyond the field. Where I can, my focus will be on drawing out what I see as the larger morals in the articles, rather tan simply summarizing them.

Two additional things I hope to start working on: 1) Telling people a bit about my current job. 2) Sharing nifty announcements from the various societies I'm associated with.

With the latter in mind, it is worth noting that the journal History of Psychology has been promoting it's section reserved for not-full-length-article contributions to the field.

A reminder that the Sources, Research Notes, and News section of History of Psychology is a venue for publication of brief research notes,
discussion of methodology, and reports on archives or sources. If you
are interested in contributing something to this section please contact
me.

Additionally, a plug for our “News & Notes PoetryCorner,” which emphasizes the marginal, yet notably amusing, role of psychology-oriented poetics in the history of the field. If
you’re “holding” any little known or much lauded poetic gems by or
about psychologists or psychology, I invite you to send them along to be
featured.

Monday, May 22, 2017

I have a paper coming out in the next issue of Ecological Psychology. It is an article written for the 50th anniversary of Gibson's The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. The article lays out the foundation of Ecological Psychology, as I see it, the core insights of the field connected to Gibson's prescient insight regarding what an evolutionary theory of perception must look like. This logic was most well developed in the 1966 book, and because Gibson was not keen on repeating himself, those ideas were not drawn out to nearly the same extent in his later works. Finalizing that article has me thinking again about the relationship between ecological and social psychology.

A decade ago I started a dialog in Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science about the relationship between Ecological Psychology and Social Psychology. It started as my first formal foray into connecting the work of E. B. Holt and J. J. Gibson, and ended up with three articles written by myself, three official comments, and a several articles (both in IPBS and in other venues) that referenced the discussion. My first article was very broad, but the replies focused the exchange on the more radical possibilities of an ecological-social psychology. The start of it al, the lead in for the first paper, was Holt's marvelous metaphor between a coral reef and the peril's of psychological reductionism (especially "bead-theory" approaches to psychology):